


Has Left Them in Their Adversity

by Anonymous



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-10
Updated: 2009-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-02 07:30:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hope, that comforter in danger! If one already has solid advantages to fall back upon, one can indulge in hope—by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Has Left Them in Their Adversity

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Thucydides' _History of the Peloponnesian War_. Quotations and allusions from _Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest_; _Le Chanson de Roland_, verse LXVI (Charles Scott Moncrieff's translation provided below); the _Metrical Dindshenchas_, poem 6, edited by Edward Gwynn (translation below); Alexander Pope's translation of _The Odyssey_, book 9; _The Silver Swan_, edited by Robert Bell; paraphrased from Steven King's _The Dark Tower_; Virgil's _Aeneid_, VI. 1-362; the King James Bible, 2 Corinthians 12:1-6; Dante Aligheri's _La Divina Commedia_: _Inferno_, II; Christopher Marlowe, _Hero and Leander_ and _Edward II_, V.i.

> Hope, that comforter in danger! If one already has solid advantages to fall back upon, one can indulge in hope...by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined. ~Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War  
> 

  


"Against de cold," Tia Dalma had said, adding with a sly look, "and de sorrow."

She hadn't been able to resist taking the cup, at that, although she doubted that any mere liquid could wash away the taste of ashes under her tongue or that the rough clay could soothe the numbness of her fingertips where she had touched the manacles. She wasn't sure how much the witch knew, and did not ask.

The drink smelled of bitter herbs, honey and coffee, and made the back of her throat ache when she inhaled the vapor rising off its surface. She was not near tears, _not sorry_, but she looked up anyway, blinking hard, avoiding Will's stricken gaze, and watched the monkey scramble about, swinging from the jar of cloudy glass, to the wall as chill as wet skin, to behind the beaded curtain, which made a sound like teeth as he clambered through. How it had come here, she didn't know, and for one fragile moment, even wondered if the hurricane that had cost James his commission had been a device to fling that vile little creature across the sea from the Isla de Muerta to this dim, smoky-smelling hut.

It was not likely, but she had long since learned to believe in ghost stories.

The year since the battle on board the _Dauntless_ had been a sedate one in Port Royal, as befitted a sleepy outpost in the Caribbean; but full of turmoil in Elizabeth's mind, as she struggled to reconcile her nightmares of skeleton sailors with the orderly world the padre spoke of on Sundays. But that had been easy, compared to this gap behind her ribs and the dizziness that had nearly overwhelmed her in the eerie boatride up the river.

"'S called the River of Doubt," Gibbs had whispered as they plunged under the knotted branches of the forest. "No one knows where it begins. No one's ever come back, 'tennyrate."

Doubt was not what troubled her.

It would have been a blessing, truly, to have been in doubt—she was sure it would have been torture of a different kind, because everything had gone wrong and she couldn't point to any spot on her body (the skin Jack had looked at with such a knowing gaze, the curves she had denied James) to say _there, there is where it hurts_. There had been no one moment when she had realized she could not undo what she had done, who she had become, and she could not now imagine ever not feeling this dreadful iciness in her veins, but she could have hoped, then, hoped and prayed in the most primitive way imaginable (_please please please_), and while hope would have been horrible in its own way, certainty, heavy as the rifle in her hand, was worse. That, she did not doubt.

She raised the cup to her lips, inhaling the bitter scent, and as the air flooded her throat, Jack's voice rushed into her mind, mixed with the sound of the musty wind outside the hut, reciting poetry, as he had on the _Pearl_, as they waited for fresh breezes. Jack knew—_had known_, she reminded herself harshly, never one to shirk the truth no matter how bitter—dozens of languages, or so it had seemed, as he and Gibbs traded verses in dialects she had never heard of.

_Halt sunt li pui e li val tenebrus,  
Les roches bises, les destreiz merveillus.  
_

Gibbs was a born storyteller, but Jack's voice was silk and a far-off glimpse of dolphins, lace-rough and smoke-delicate, and once, he was watching her as he spoke a language she never wanted to hear again, guttural and rolling, unending, but she had been unable to stop listening, the look in Jack's eyes, soft and terrible, pinning her to the deck.

_Óclach do Chairpre Nia Fer  
Eochu garb gérait Gáedel  
tarmairt co mbeth ní dia chlaind  
frisinn ingin, fri Achaill.  
e Dobiur teist suaichnid iarsin  
for ingin Chairpri chrichid,  
ná fríth a húair tháidi thall;  
sech óc-mnáib áille Achall.  
_

But now she would have sworn on her life (and the honor that she herself had compromised, left behind in Port Royal with her yellow parasol) that he was perched like the tropical bird he should have been on one of the trees outside, and this time, he was speaking in recognizable English—a poem she even knew.

_Lotus the name: divine, nectareous juice!  
(Thence call'd Lo'ophagi); which whose tastes,  
Insatiate riots in the sweet repasts,  
Nor other home, nor other care intends,  
But quits his house, his country, and his friends.  
_

She let out a choked sob and spat the sweet liquid she had already sipped back into the cup. It was only a poem, only an ancient fairy-tale, but she was not prepared to believe anything now. To forget Jack would be more than she could be expected to bear; to have even memories smashed like the _Black Pearl_'s longboats would be cruel beyond all imagining.

She let her gaze skid over the forms of the men she knew—the arch of Will's cheekbone, the matted knots in Pintel's hair, the bulging veins in Gibb's hands, the pale scar beneath Ragetti's ear—searching for the sharp angle of Jack's mouth, the ochre of his skin through the threadbare linen of his shirt, trying not to hope, but the small opening in the wall showed only twisted, tangled branches.

There was no one there. No faces peered in. The shimmering, wide-eyed figures in the water had not clambered up the rough-barked trees to sing in a dead man's voice. There were no skeletons clinging to the thick vines in the misty evening.

No one else had heard it. That was obvious; the steady thud of Will's knife into the raw board of the table had never paused, Ragetti was still sniffling messily, and nothing had changed.

No one else heard her mother singing a ballad, so softly that Elizabeth was only certain it was she from the lisp; Elizabeth's father had, when she was very young, made his daughter recite tongue-twisters every afternoon to eradicate the childish slur in her voice.

_The silver swan, who living had no note,  
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat,  
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,  
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:  
Farewell all joys! O death, come close mine eyes;  
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.  
_

The voices drifted in, and she began to be certain that she had gone mad. The thought gave her a certain calm; if she had gone mad, then none of this was real, Jack was not gone, she had not abandoned him, not betrayed Will (_not sorry_, she heard herself say again), and her mind was a small price to pay for such.

She still held the cup in her hands, and somewhere very far away, Gibbs spoke, but his voice was wrong, it was missing the little interjections from where Jack stood at the wheel, hip braced against the spokes, he wasn't pausing for Jack to snort and correct him (_she wasn't a mermaid, y'idiot, and we ended up in a whorehouse by the end of it so's I dunno what you're complaining about, and anyway, the part about me passing out is completely made up  
_). This was all wrong. Jack wasn't dead, he couldn't be, she couldn't have done that, she wasn't so powerful.

She was just Elizabeth. "He was a good man," she murmured, a sob breaking in her throat (_not sorry not sorry not sorry_).

Not everyone whose voice echoed in the air around her was someone she knew—men sang, their baritones and basses rumbling deep in her chest, in sibilants and hisses, and she could not understand what they were saying. There were babies' thin whimpers, and something twisted behind her breast. Every one of the people—she could not doubt that they were real—echoed the anguish that hollowed out her bones and swam through her veins.

A woman's voice interrupted; Elizabeth was instantly certain she had never heard her before, and she was keening, a sharp spiraling cry of grief that cut off abruptly, and then she snarled, low and fierce (was it Anamaria? No, it couldn't be, Anamaria wasn't dead, she'd found an abandoned skiff, fixed it up, was smuggling quite successfully, Jack had said, Jack had _said_, he wouldn't lie—except, of course, he would have and never would again), "You mustn't steal my grief, for I'd drink it to the dregs, every drop."

Just because she was _not sorry (not sorry not sorry_), did not mean she did not grieve.

The sudden, blinding, choking rush of sorrow, and the way she welcomed it (_not sorry not sorry this is the only way not sorry this is what has to happen I have chosen this not sorry  
_), was terrible beyond what she could have imagined, and when she heard Will say her name, she looked up abruptly, grateful for the distraction. But the witch stepped between them, her shadow casting darkness over Will's face, and she said, almost snarling, "Would you do it? Would you sail to the end of the earth, to fetch him back, him and him precious _Pearl_?"

Elizabeth stared at her in amazement; the very idea was blasphemous, and while only a few seconds ago she would have said that nothing could have astonished her anymore, the reverberation of her shock went bone-deep. She was no hero—the manner in which Jack had gone, had died, was enough to prove that. She could not now rescue him. Jack could not want his murderer to come after him, to drag him back to Davy Jones's vengeance. (But somewhere, a small worm of flame, heat and hope, as if fresh along the edge of kindling, began to spread.)

She was no Aeneas, plunging to the edge of Hades to discover a destiny she'd been craving; no St. Paul, caught up by a god—she had chosen what she had done and would do it again, she knew, she was _not sorry_; and she certainly was not Dante, who had been willing to brave anything, even damnation, for someone he —and she swallowed nothing carefully, pressing the dry clay of the mug against her lips, tasting only the scent of the sluggish, brackish river and the unfamiliar scent of luck.

"Yes," she said. And the voices that still swirled around her began to sing yes; but she didn't dare risk drinking anything yet, only biting the rim of the cup so hard her teeth ached as if with sweetness. Yes. She would. She was not sorry, but she would do anything to undo what she had wrought, and if that meant—this, then so be it.

When the stairs creaked, she turned with everyone else, but she was still listening to Jack's voice fading, but she could hear him laugh once, and her heart seized painfully, and then he whispered mockingly, _Above our life we love a steadfast friend. But darling, all places are alike, and every earth is fit for burial.  
_

* * *

  


_Le Chanson de Roland_:  
High are the peaks, the valleys shadowful,  
Swarthy the rocks, the narrows wonderful.

_The Metrical Dindshencha_s:  
A squire of Cairpre Nia Fer,  
Eochu the fierce, champion of the Gaels,  
attempted to have one of his children  
by the maiden, by Achall.  
I give sure testimony thereon  
to the daughter of Cairpre...  
that a stolen hour with her was not to be had in that place;  
Achall surpasses all damsels in beauty.


End file.
